1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to apparatus and computer program product embodiments for reducing network communication and facilitating efficient failover processing in a distributed shared memory (DSM)-based application in a computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Distributed shared memory (DSM) provides an abstraction that allows users to view a physically distributed memory of a distributed system as a virtually shared address space. A central advantage of DSM is the convenience provided for the programmers of distributed applications, reducing or eliminating the requirement to be aware of the distributed architecture of the system and the requirement to use a less intuitive form of communication within a distributed system via message passing. Another advantage of DSM is the ability to directly port software written for non-distributed systems to work on distributed systems.
There are many forms of DSM algorithms, all of them sharing a fundamental architecture of being composed of distributed agents deployed on the clustered nodes (i.e. processors), each agent maintaining local data structures and memory data segments, and a communication protocol over a message passing layer being used to coordinate operations among the agents. A central goal of any DSM algorithm is to minimize message traffic for a given workload. An underlying goal is to maintain memory coherency of each agent and of the entire DSM.